16
Wednesday, October 25, 2017 The Nugget Newspaper, Sisters, Oregon
The Bunkhouse
Chronicle
Craig Rullman
Columnist
A Bronx Cheer
A few days ago I hap-
pened to be in the gro-
cery store, buying some
stuff to nibble on dur-
ing the American League
Championship Series, when
I noticed a young man —
I’m in a post-season mood
so I’m going to call him
Billy Martin — re-stocking
the older fruits and vegeta-
bles. He was doing a tidy,
efficient job of it, and I was
intrigued.
The old stuff went into
a box on the bottom of his
cart, and with admirable
speed and finesse the new
stuff was shuttled into the
display. Billy Martin is a
man who knows his trade.
And, in full disclosure, I’ve
done good business with
Billy in the past. Once, we
needed fresh dill for pickling
cucumbers, and Billy deliv-
ered — the very next day.
I was suddenly curious to
know where all of that old
food eventually wound up,
so I walked over and asked
Billy Martin what the story
was. “We throw it all out,”
he said, which was surpris-
ing, and struck me as both
tragic and revealing on many
fronts. So I asked Billy —
stupidly, it turns out — if I
could take some of the old
food, or all of it even, off his
hands. I was thinking that
our chickens would make
short work of the stuff, and
that the horses would love
to tear into a few mildly
bruised and perfectly edible
apples, but I had forgotten
what century we live in.
“We can’t,” Billy told
me, shaking his head, and
then went on to explain that
they had done just such a
thing, in the long ago, until
someone, somewhere, fed
cast-off apples to her horse
and the horse died. We
have no definitive word on
whether or not the apples
were actually to blame —
and one is suspicious of the
claim — but the lawsuit for
damages that followed put
the eternal brakes on doing
something useful with older
food.
Grocery stores around the
nation, getting a strong whiff
of liability in the wind, shut
down the practice.
Let’s review: A woman
asked a grocery store for
free, or greatly reduced,
apples that were going in the
trash. She took them home
and fed them to her horse.
The horse died. She sued the
store. The store likely paid
off — whether the claim was
legitimate or not it’s gener-
ally cheaper than fighting the
lawsuit (see Modern Police
Work for further explana-
tion) — and outlawed the
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“You’re in the right hands”
practice.
Billy described to me
a particularly sad scene,
which I had no trouble envi-
sioning, wherein a long-time
customer, an elderly gentle-
man who had been taking
old produce off the store’s
hands for years, came in
expecting to pick some up,
when Billy had been forced
to explain the new policy.
It was as if, and this is my
own imaginative reconstruc-
tion, the kindly old man had
been brutally struck by the
fungo bat of modern liti-
gious reality.
This episode of the Old
Produce Conundrum got me
thinking about how much
produce gets thrown out
in America. It’s probably
impossible to quantify with
terrific accuracy, but one
conservative estimate places
the number at around 60
million tons per year. That’s
120,000,000,000 pounds
of food every year. I think
that number is Gazillion —
wasted. An estimate on the
worldwide waste of other-
wise usable produce puts it
at around 1.6 billion tons per
year.
In many cases, there is
nothing wrong with the food
at all, except that it has a
blemish of some sort, which
reduces the ability of stores
to sell it, so it either rots in
the field or is abandoned
in warehouses and eventu-
ally tossed. That is what is
known as the “downstream
problem,” in case you were
wondering.
We probably shouldn’t
be too shocked by all of this
waste, given that in the U.S.
we consume nearly 20 mil-
lion barrels of oil each and
every day. A barrel of oil is
considered to be 42 gallons,
so that means we are con-
suming 840,000,000 gallons
of oil PER DAY.
One is left to wonder
exactly how long that kind
of consumption and waste
can actually go on before the
trap door opens up and we
all fall through it.
We are not a country
that lives lightly or even,
apparently, with any notion
whatsoever that we are
heartily taxing the planet’s
ability to sustain the 7.6
billion people who live on
it. And that number, by the
way, is expected to reach
11.2 billion by the year
2100.
If you think it’s hard to
make a left turn in Sisters
now, just you wait.
Anyway, it’s October,
playoff time, and I am a
fan of the notoriously evil
New York Yankees. I can be
that because I was raised in
what my friends and siblings
fondly referred to as the
BFE, which is shorthand
for saying a long way from
anywhere, and we could
choose whatever teams we
wanted. The point is that
Yankees fans have perfected
what is known as The Bronx
Cheer. This is an utterly
sarcastic round of applause
aimed at Yankees play-
ers who are not performing
well. Dellin Betances, who
in the playoffs has been
suddenly unable to find
the strike zone, earned his
first Bronx Cheer in Game
2 of the ALCS by walk-
ing two batters in the top of
the 9th — with an eight-run
lead.
So in that spirit, after my
visit to the grocery store
and an inspired study of
our American wastefulness,
I’m offering up a hearty
Bronx Cheer to that name-
less woman — condolences
to the horse – who sued a
store over the free apples
she wanted, and ruined
the game for everybody
else.
Let us show you
how much you can
save this year!
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